Dana Blankenhorn

Fatherhood

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 35 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have a long-time grudge against someone who shares my last name. David Blankenhorn (right).

The other Blankenhorn runs something called the Institute for American Values, a wingnut front group. He is best known as the author of Fatherless America, where he argues for the obligation of fathers to stay with their kids.

I may resent him because of what my dad did. He stayed. He had demons, but he stayed. He was abusive, and he was a hound, but he stayed. He was miserable, he made us miserable much of the time, but he stayed.

I had two fathers coming up. One was a drunk who hit me and only expressed his love through things. The other was a small businessman who charmed his customers and managed his people.

Among my siblings I was the fortunate one. I spent most of my time growing-up with this second man. I called him Fred. But he wasn't my dad. He was my boss. I filed, I stacked inventory, I went out on calls. It was a TV repair shop so I watched a ton of TV. My dad spent 66 hours a week at his shop, and what I learned was that if I didn't get away from it I'd die.

Many years later, through the eyes of my own kids, I learned some of what drove him through the eyes of my own children. By then my old family was gone, they were all 3,000  miles away, and I had to find my own answers.

What I most resent about "the other Blankenhorn" is his idea that you have to stay, because I felt my dad should not have stayed. How much better might his life had been, might my life had been, if instead of sucking it up we just had his money, and my mom had a chance to find someone more compatible?

What my dad taught me was that a miserable marriage is worse than none at all. This was the opposite of what I heard from the other Blankenhorn. His teachings ran counter to everything I had come to know.

Then I had my own kids, and I learned something important.

Not Good Enough

The apology of Pope Benedict XVI for the Church's sex abuse scandal is not good enough.

Not by a long shot.

His words remind me of what a child says when he or she is caught taking the toy of another child. The personal shame and repentance may be real. But is anything really changing?

In this case it's clear nothing is changing. This is certain because we haven't heard of the Church doing anything in the other countries where it works. The Church is acting like this is some sort of American aberration, when the only aberrant thing about it is priests here were caught, and the Church as a whole was held to account.

"It wasn't just sexual abuse, it was spiritual abuse," one victim told CNN, but he wasn't the only one spiritually abused. His whole family was, and his whole congregation was.

There are few crimes in this world whose impact can compare with that of child sexual abuse. It happens every day -- in every denomination and creed -- and it destroys everyone it touches.

This isn't a gay crime. It's a crime of power.

When done against a child by a person who claims authority from God, it's even worse. The chance of the victim opening up to anyone, and seeking a cure for the hurt and anger inside them, drops to near zero. And the resulting scars last a lifetime.

A Father's Worst Fear

Once you have a child your own death is no longer the worst fear you can imagine.

Every parent knows this. Risk and loss are the price we pay for love. The price is highest when it comes to our kids.

Yet people pay it every day. Babies die, and older children get cancer. Teenagers lose their lives in car accidents, black teenagers more often in a hail of bullets. Athletes get sudden heart attacks. Then we give these most precious gifts to the nation, and risk their loss in war.

We can't protect them, although we try. We fret over them instead, natter at them, worry aloud until they send us an exasperated "Mu-therrrrr" or "Daaaaad" to shut us down, because they have that first fear, their own deaths an unimaginable horror.

Dust

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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On sunny Sunday mornings, while the rest of Atlanta is in bed, at church, or huddling over brunch, I ride my bike downtown and visit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (right).

It's quiet then. Just a few Japanese tourists wander by. If it's sunny, if I've been riding a few hours, I will sit by the reflecting pool and talk to him.

I don't expect him to talk back. He's dust. His tomb is a symbol for the life he lived, and the work he did. I was pleased when I snapped this picture, because it shows his wife Coretta is now with him. She lived nearly as long without him as he'd spent time on this Earth (38 years against 39) but they're together now in heaven, and in memory.

Sudden Death

I suffered some panic attacks recently, and I  now know why.

Russell Shaw (right), my friend of many years, died suddenly on Friday. He was 60.

Sudden death is a shock to loved ones at any age.

For the young it most often comes from a bullet or a car crash. A few athletes die suddenly from undiagnosed heart conditions, and these cause the most shock of all because it's not supposed to happen that way.

Hate, Fear and Hope

The great progress of my generation is that our hates and fears have become our political divide.

That wasn't the case before the 1960s. Before the 1960s we were united in our hates and fears. Hatred of black people was endemic to the Democratic Party's mission for generations. The response by generations of Republicans was to speak to those fears while doing as little as possible about them.

The idea that this is progress came to me while watching Barack Obama in Philadelphia today. It was the kind of transcendent talk I was hoping for. It even shocked some Republicans for its bluntness, because he acknowledged the legitimate grievances of people like Geraldine Ferraro, even as he urged us all to get over them.

But he also went beyond this. In talking about Jeremiah Wright (above), and about the Trinity Church he attends, he brought home the religious nature of our hates and fears as well. Then he turned the mirror on himself:

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

In giving his own confession, Obama challenged us all to testify, and in that testimony to make the changes in our hearts which are a precondition to real racial progress.

A Great Man Passing

I was out last week, saying goodbye to a Great Man. .

Bennie F. Steinhauser (right) was my father-in-law. We drove 2,100 miles over 5 days for his funeral.

He could be intimidating, without trying to be. When I first met him, in the mid-1970s, he was at the height of his power. He was a veteran school superintendent. He lived in a great house he'd designed himself. He was constantly moving among his ranches and his factory. He presided over Sunday suppers for an enormous extended family that included third cousins.

I was there to steal his baby.

He didn't much take to me. I was a scruffy, bearded college student whose sole ambition was to work at a newspaper. His baby, whom I called Jenni, was an honor student, a space science major, maybe a future Astronaut. She was beautiful, talented, and brilliant. Still is.

So I could never bring myself call him Bennie, even after he asked. It was always Mr. Steinhauser. Maybe, had I had known the other Bennie F. Steinhausers, the ones in his autobiography “Never Alone” (which I insisted on not writing), I might have felt closer.

Belief in Evil

The nightmare I've been dealing with concerning our son reaches another climax tomorrow with an appearance at juvenile court.

After three months of this I have a pretty clear idea what happened. We're hoping for the best.

But regardless, what seems very clear is that the teacher who claims my son assaulted her believes firmly in good and evil. Especially evil.

Evil can be a noun, a verb, or a modifier. As a verb it refers to action everyone knows is wrong. As a noun it refers to the person behind that action, and may also be used to damn their character, to consign them to the netherworld of death or prison. As a modifier it's a political football as in the term evil-doer.

How many more innocents have died in Iraq these last 5 years, at our hands, wittingly or unwittingly, compared to the number who died on 9-11? Yet our leaders refer to those who planned 9-11 as evil-doers, and to our own good men and women as liberators.

It's nonsense. War is evil, no matter who does it, no matter their cause. It is all hell. It is violence, it is destruction.  It's a central lesson told by everyone who has come back from any war. The only way to justify such evil is to see the other side as more evil, so that the war becomes self-defense.

I shouldn't criticize. That's our defense as well.

Paul and Huckabee

The rise of Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee is great news for Democrats.

No offense to their supporters, but both candidates throw a major element of the Republican coalition off the bus. Their appeal is based on this dismissal, and without absolute unity Republicans can't win.

Just ask Democrats what disunity did for them.

If you've been playing The 1967 Game along with us, you'll recognize these guys as the extremist wings of the Democratic Party from that time, the fire-breathers who drew cheers from their supporters while turning a generation off the Democratic Party brand.

In Ron Paul's case, he's tossing the neo-conservatives off the bus. Then he's running over them. Then he's backing the bus up to run over them again.

You don't just hear it in the sneer he gives their imperial aims in Iraq, you hear it clearly in the cheers with which his followers greet this. They don't care if Paul is an economic royalist, an ultra-Randian, an anti-government absolutist so extreme (sincere, and consistent) in his beliefs that he probably couldn't be re-elected from his South Houston district (he refuses to bring home the bacon, just leaves it on the side of the road to rot).

You don't support Ron Paul with your head. You support him with your heart, and your guts. In your guts you know he's nuts. You are, too. You live in a world of political theory, a jungle world you wouldn't personally survive a day in, unless you had the morals of an ax-murderer. (He's got Bud Light. And a chainsaw!)

Ritalin Wars Do Damage

One of the more interesting news items to hit our house recently was that MRIs confirm how ADHD impacts brain development.

Areas of the brain which are taught in kindergarten, those involved in social rules and cues, develop slowly. Areas of the brain dealing with higher functions develop normally.

This doesn't just explain the physiology of ADHD, but may also explain some of our social pathologies toward it. The idea of changing when things are taught is anathema to many people. ADHD kids are taught things they can't learn, then blamed later for having failed to learn them.

Unfortunately this isn't how the news was read by readers of Judith Warner (right) in The New York Times.  Let kids be kids, and they'll grow out of it, reared its ugly head, " a nation of boys drugged into conformity by knee-jerk liberal school systems."

Pl-ease!

You can't "let ADHD kids be kids," in that you can't just let them run around loose, unmanaged, and expect them to learn anything. You have to find some way to give them structure, to make them sit, before they can learn. And once they do sit, they learn faster than other kids, they hyper-focus and can become better at what interests them. The sooner you can start this process, the sooner strengths can be recognized and rewarded.

In my own case, knowing about my ADHD might have been the best medicine, only I wasn't given it. Instead, I was sent to a psychiatrist who knew nothing of the condition and an offer of Ritalin was rejected by my mother, who said  "you're not going to put my kid on drugs."

The result was a pretty hellish childhood, at least from the point of view of my own mind, one which I've only forgiven my parents for in the last decade, since I learned the cause of my trouble. Instead of being given help I was sent to a Baptist youth camp upstate, which taught Revelations until it came out of my ears, complete with movies. Step out of line and you'll fry in hell, they said, and here's what it will look like. Those images still inform my nightmares and leave me more than a little skeptical about churches and God, even though I know such communities can help whether or not you believe the doctrine.